One of the horror genre's "most widely read critics" (Rue Morgue # 68), "an accomplished film journalist" (Comic Buyer's Guide #1535), and the award-winning author of Horror Films of the 1980s (2007), The Rock and Roll Film Encyclopedia (2007) and Horror Films of the 1970s (2002), John Kenneth Muir, presents his blog on film, television and nostalgia, named one of the Top 100 Film Studies Blog on the Net.

The
U.S.S. Enterprise conducts a routine geological survey of “Type 4” asteroids, but comes under surprise attack from Romulan
forces.

The
Romulan commander accuses the Federation starship of violating its territorial space,
and Captain Kirk (William Shatner) engineers a dangerous escape by ordering the
Enterprise through an “unidentified
energy field” of “highly-charged
subatomic particles.”

Although
Kirk’s ship and crew are safe from further Romulan attack, his ship begins to
suffer from a series of strange practical jokes. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) ends up with black-eye
circles on his lids after gazing through his library computer hood, and the
food dispenser throws a pie in Scotty’s (James Doohan’s) face.

Meanwhile,
Bones (DeForest Kelley), Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) and Sulu (George Takei)
become trapped in the Enterprise’s rec room, which is able to create any
environment known to man by rearranging matter and energy. Soon, they find themselves moving from one
environment to the next, including a blizzard, in an attempt to stay alive.

Kirk
and Spock soon realize that an alien entity from the space cloud -- a practical joker -- now inhabits the
Enterprise’s main computer. Worse, the
Romulans are back!

The
Star
Trek: The Next Generation plot-device of the “holodeck malfunction” gets its first try-out in this Star
Trek: The Animated Series episode from 1974.

In
“The Practical Joker,” the audience witnesses members of the Enterprise crew
visiting the so-called “rec room,”
and there’s even an early version of the control
arch seen in various frames (though it is a stand-up console, and not a
door-arch.)

I’ve
always considered the holodeck to be a writer’s crutch on The Next Generation, so I’m
not thrilled to see it here, but this episode undeniably forecasts the use of
the plot device (and the idea of crew men being caught in a blizzard, a notion
re-visited in “The Big Goodbye.”) In a
sense, this plot-line actually goes back to Original Trek, and the episode “Wolf
in the Fold.” There, a non-corporeal
life form (Jack the Ripper) “possessed” the ship’s computer. Virtually the same thing happens here, except
the entity is not evil, merely naughty.

Impressively,
“The Practical Joker” also manages a budget-buster that only the format of animation
could have achieved and afforded in this era.
One scene reveals the Enterprise crew experiencing weightlessness when
the alien being begins to play with the starship’s gravity control. Star Trek fans would have to wait
for Star
Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) to see a starship crew
(Klingon in this case…) rendered weightless in live-action..

Less
enjoyable by far is the underwhelming depiction of the Romulans in “The
Practical Joker.” In this story, they
attempt to start a war with the Federation, even though the Enterprise never
wandered into the Empire’s territory. In
“The Survivor,” the Romulans used a similar gambit, with the same lack of
success. It seems odd that the Romulans
of the Animated Series are so hell-bent on luring the Federation into
a war, and using the Enterprise as the flash-point of such a conflict.

Finally,
the episode’s valedictory conceit, that the alien cloud/practical joker should be
transferred to an enemy, the Romulans, is a clear reflection of the resolution
in the original “The Trouble with Tribbles.”

Historically-speaking,
the science fiction and fantasy cinema has battled high camp -- a form of art notable because of its
exaggerated or over-the-top attributes -- for over five
decades.

That
long battle is definitively lost in Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze
(1975), a tongue-in-cheek film adaptation of the pulp magazine hero (or
superhero) created by Henry W. Ralston and story editor John L. Nanovi (with
additional material from Lester Dent) in
the 1930s.

The
seventies movie from producer George Pal (1908 – 1980) and director Michael
Anderson brazenly makes a mockery of the titular hero’s world, his missions,
and even his patriotic belief system.
That the film is poorly paced, and looks more like a TV pilot rather
than a full-fledged motion picture only adds to a laundry list of problems.

First
some background on high camp: when camp is discussed as a mode of expression,
what is really being debated is a sense of authorial or creative distance. When a film is overtly campy, the author or
authors (since film is a collaborative art form…) have made the deliberate
decision to stand back and observe the property being adapted from a dramatic
and in fact, critical distance. They find the subject matter humorous, or
worthy of ribbing, and have adapted by that belief as a guiding principle.

Notably
not all creative “standing back” need result in a campy or tongue-in-cheek approach,
and instead can help a film function admirably as pastiche or homage. In movies like Star Wars (1977), Raiders
of the Lost Ark (1981) and even Scream (1996), there is a sense of
knowing humor at work, but a campy tone is not the result.

In
short, then, the camp approach represents sort of the furthest artistic distance a creator can imagine him or herself
from his or her material. Worse, that great
distance often seems to emerge from a place of genuine contempt; from a sense that the adapter is better than or superior
to the material being adapted…and thus boasts the right/responsibility to mock
said property.

Although
Dino De Laurentiis’s King Kong (1976) and Flash
Gordon (1980) are often offered up on a platter as Exhibits A and B for
“campy” style big-budget science fiction or fantasy films, those examples don’t
actually fit the bill very well.

Rather,
close viewing suggests that Kong and Flash boast
self-reflexive qualities and a sense of humor, but nonetheless boast a sense of
closeness to the material at hand. In
both films, in other words, the viewer gets close enough to feel invested in the characters and their
stories, despite the interjection of humor, self-reflexive commentary or rampant
post-modernism. When King Kong is gunned
down by helicopters…the audience mourns.
And when Flash’s theme song by Queen kicks in and he takes the fight to
Ming the Merciless, we feel roused to cheer at his victory. We may laugh at jokes in the films, but we
aren’t so far – distance-wise - that we can’t invest in the action

However,
a true “camp” film negates such sense of meaning or identification, and instead
portrays a world that is good only for a laugh, no matter the production
values, no matter the efforts of the actors, director, or other talents.

Doc
Savage: Man of Bronze
is such a campy film, one that, post-Watergate, adopts a contemptuous approach
to anyone in authority, and, in facts, makes heroism itself seem ridiculous and
unbelievable. There are ample reasons
for this approach, at this time in American history, but those reasons don’t
mean that the approach is right for the Doc Savage character. After all, who can honestly invest in a hero
who is so perfect, so square, so beautiful that the twinkle in his eye is
literal…added as a special effect?

Although
many critics also mistakenly term Superman: The Movie (1978) campy
that film revolutionized superhero filmmaking because it took the hero’s world,
his powers, and his relationships seriously.
Certainly, there was goofy humor in the last third of the film, but that
humor was never permitted to undercut the dignity of Superman, or minimize the
threats that he faced, or to mock his heroic journey.

Again,
Doc
Savage represents the precise opposite approach. The film plays exceedingly like a two-hour
put-down of superhero tropes and ideas, and wants its audience only to laugh at
a character that actually proved highly influential in the World War II Era. The result is a film that might well be
termed a disaster.

"Let us be considerate of our country, our fellow citizens and our associates in everything we say and do..."

International
hero Doc Savage (Ron Ely) and his team of The Fabulous Five return to New York
City only to face a deadly assassination attempt upon receiving the news of the
death of Savage’s father.

After
dispatching the assassin, Savage decides to fly to Hidalgo to investigate his
father’s death. He and his Fabulous Five
are soon involved in a race with the nefarious Captain Seas (Paul Wexler) to take
possession of a secret South American valley, one where gold literally
bubbles-up out of the ground…

"Have No Fear: Doc Savage is Here!"

With
a little knowledge of history, one can certainly understand why Doc
Savage: The Man of Bronze was created in full campy mode.

In 1975, the United States was reeling from
the Watergate Scandal, the resignation of President Nixon, the Energy Crisis,
and the ignominious end of American involvement in Vietnam. The Establishment had rather egregiously
failed the country, one might argue, and so superheroes – scions of authority, essentially – were not to be taken seriously. You can see this quality of culture play out
in the press’s treatment of President Gerald Ford. An accomplished athlete who carried his
University of Michigan football team to national titles in 1932 and 1933, Ford
was transformed, almost overnight, into a clumsy buffoon by the pop culture. It
was easier to parse Ford by his pratfalls than by his prowess.

High
camp had also begun to creep into the popular James Bond series as Roger Moore assumed
the 007 role from Sean Connery, in efforts like Live and Let Die (1972)
and The
Man with the Golden Gun (1974).
And on television, the most popular superhero program, TV’s Batman
(1966 - 1968) had also operated in a
campy mode

But,
what films like Doc Savage fail to do, rather egregiously, is take a beloved
character on his or her own terms,
and present his hero to an audience by those terms. Instead of taking the effort to showcase and
describe why Doc Savage’s world exists as it does in the pulps, the film wants
only to showcase a world that easily mocked.
The message that is transmitted, and which, generously, might be
interpreted as unintentional is simply: this
whole superhero world is silly, and if you like it, there’s something silly
about you too.

In
some sense, Doc Savage is a reminder of how good the British
Pellucidar/Caprona movies of Kevin Connor are.
Their special effects may be poor by today’s standard, but the movies
take themselves and their world seriously.
You can see that everyone involved is generally working to thrill the
audience, not to prove to the audience how silly the movie’s concepts are.

Alas,
camp worms its way into virtually every aspect of Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze. An early scene depicts Savage pulling an
assassin’s bullet out of a hole in his apartment wall, and knowing instantly
the caliber and the make of the weapon from which it was fired. In other words, he is so perfect (a scholar,
philosopher, inventor, and surgeon…) that his skill looks effortless…and therefore
funny.

Yet
the pulp origins of the character make plain the fact that Doc Savage achieved
his knowledge through hard work, and rigorous training. When you only see the end result in the movie,
his intelligence and know-how is mocked and made a punch-line. The movie-makers didn’t need to do it this
way. Savage could have undertaken an
investigation, but it’s funnier just to make him all-knowing, to exaggerate his
admirable qualities as a character.

Another
example of how camp undercuts and mocks the heroes of the film occurs later in
the action. Doc and his team of merry
men (The Fabulous Five) are invited aboard the antagonist’s yacht for a dinner
party. While
the bad guy, Captain Seas, and his henchmen drink alcohol, Savage and his men
drink only…milk.Again, this touch is so ludicrous when made
manifest on screen that it only succeeds in stating, again, the essential
“silliness” of the Doc Savage mythos.Worse, Batman had done this joke, and better, in its 1966
premiere. So the milk joke isn’t even original.

Perhaps
the campies aspect of the film involves the atrocious soundtrack. The movie is scored to the work of John
Phillip Sousa (1854 – 1932), the “American March King.” Rightly or wrongly, Sousa’s marches have
become synonymous with Americana, Fourth of July parades and firework displays,
with the very archetype of patriotism itself. To score Savage’s silly
adventures to this kind of stereotypical “American” march is to say,
essentially, that one is mocking that value.

I
have nothing against mocking patriotism, if that’s your game. I can’t pass judgment on that or you. For me as a film critic, the question comes
back to, again, the sense of distance created by the adapters, and whether that
distance serves the interest of the
character being adapted. In the case
of Doc Savage, I would say that it
rather definitively does not serve the character. The choice of soundtrack music essentially
turns all action scenes -- no matter how brilliantly vetted in terms of stunts
and visuals -- into nothing more than grotesque, unfunny parody.

Why
do I feel that the character Savage is not well-served by this approach? Consider that all five of Savage’s “merry
men” are important, philosophically not in terms of raw strength or athleticism,
or even super powers.

Indeed,
one is a legal genius, one is a chemist, one is a globe-hopping engineer, one
is an archaeologist and one is an electrical wizard. Throw in Savage -- both a man of action and also a surgeon, for example – and consider
the group’s original context: post-World War I.

These
men survived the first technological war in human history, but a war – like all
war – spawned by irrationality and passion.
Their quality or importance as characters arises from the fact they are
a modern, rational group of adventures, dependent on science, the law,
medicine, and other intellectual ideas…not emotions or super abilities. In 1975, the world certainly could have used
such an example; the idea that being a superhero meant rationality and intelligence. But the movie completely fails to deliver on
the original meaning of the characters it depicts. Instead, Doc Savage makes a mockery of these
avatars of reason, and fails to note why, as a team, they represent something,
anything of importance.

Some
of the camp touches in Doc Savage are also downright
baffling, rather than funny. One villain sleeps in what appears to be a giant
cradle, and is rocked to sleep. The
movie never establishes a reason -- even
a camp one -- for this preference.

Although
it is great to see Pamela Hensley -- Buck Rogers’ Princess Ardala -- in
the film, I can think of almost no reason for anyone to re-visit Doc
Savage. Who, precisely is this
film made for? Fans of the pulps would
be horrified at the tone of the material, and those who didn’t know the
character before the film certainly would not come away from the film liking
him.

In
1984, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai successfully captured what
was funny about characters like Doc, while at the same time functioning as an
earnest adventure. Indeed, though I
often complain about all the doom and gloom superhero movies of today, and what
a boring drag they are, they are, as I have often written, a valid response to
the era of Camp.

What
is needed for the genre now, I think, is some kind of judicious middle
ground. The humorless, joyless,
mechanical, special-effects laden superhero movies of today are a drag on the
soul (and the patience), and yet I am so
glad to be rid of the mocking humiliation of high camp.

At
either extreme -- camp or angst -- the superhero film formula proves almost immediately
tiring and unworkable, it often seems. A
clear exception is Chronicle, which is the most original, dynamic, high-flying
superhero-themed film we’ve had in years.

Thursday, September 05, 2013

Next week -- from Monday September 9th thru Thursday September 12th -- the blog will celebrate the 20th anniversary of Chris Carter's The X-Files. I'll be presenting brand new reviews of popular episodes, and digging deep into the blog archives to commemorate the first two decades of Scully and Mulder.

The truth will be right here, 9/9 - 9/12/13, so I hope you'll join me for the big event!

Before the Star Wars Kenner toy craze of 1977 - 1983, Mego ruled the science fiction toy world (with some competition from Mattel and Kenner) with great action figures and playsets from such movie and TV franchises as Star Trek and Planet of the Apes.

On the latter front, Mego manufactured and marketed a whole slew of great Apes-centric playsets. These included my favorite, the Forbidden Zone Trap, and a Planet of the Apes tree house.

The only Mego playset I didn't own came out at the same time as the Apes TV series (1974 - 1975): The Planet of the Apes Fortress.

This crudely pyramid-like structure stands a whopping twenty-seven inches tall, and consists of two fully-detailed play levels, upper and lower.

As the box trumpets, the Fortress also comes with an array of equipment and props for the Mego action figures, including 3 rifles, 3 control sticks, 1 Planet of the Apes flag, 2 ladders, 1 table, 1 gun rack, and 1 detention pen (or jail cell.)

The neatest item, however, is the Fortress's (working) sun reflector, which actually appeared as a simian signalling device in one episode of the short-lived series. Galen (Roddy McDowall) used the device to send a false message to a gorilla patrol, if memory serves.

Today, the Planet of the Apes Fortress playset and all its gear often sell on E-Bay for over three hundred dollars, a factor which likely means I won't get my hands on one until I'm independently wealthy. But one can dream, right?

Tuesday, September 03, 2013

All boundaries are
conventions waiting to be transcended. One may transcend any convention, if
only can first conceive of doing so.”

-Cloud Atlas (2012)

The
2012 Wachowski/Tom Tykwer science fiction film Cloud Atlas is a sprawling, three
hour epic, and a dedicated adaptation of David Mitchell’s award-winning novel
of the same name, first published in 2004. The novel tells six stories (or a sextet, if
you prefer), set in six different time periods, ranging from centuries ago to
centuries in the future.

It
is necessary to describe these six stories briefly, so you have a full sense of
them, before I continue to review the film.

“We
cross and re-cross our old paths like figure-skaters.”

First,
there’s “The Pacific Journal of Adam
Ewing,” set in the South Pacific in 1849. Adam Ewing (Jim Sturgess) is the
son-in-law of a slave-trader (Hugo Weaving).
Adam falls grievously ill on his return home to England, but is deliberately
made sicker by a con-man, Dr. Goose (Tom Hanks), who wishes to steal his
wealth. Fortunately, Adam has befriended
a black slave and stowaway on the ship, one who is grateful for Adam’s
kindnesses, and comes to watch over him.

The
second story, “Letters from Frobisher”
is set in 1936 Scotland, and involves a brilliant young musician, Frobisher
(Ben Whislaw) who creates a sextet called the Cloud Atlas while mentoring with
one of the world’s greatest composers, Vyvian Ayrs (Jim Broadbent). When Ayrs
recognizes his talent, however, he uses Frobisher’s homosexuality to extort him
and imprisons the young man in his home until he hands over the Cloud Atlas. Frobisher’s lover, Rufus Sixsmith (James
D’Arcy) tries to save Frobisher, but fate rips them apart.

The
third tale, “Half-Lives: The First Luisa
Rey Mystery” is set in San Francisco in 1973, and features a dedicated
reporter, Luisa (Halle Berry) who learns a dangerous secret about a nuclear
plant that will soon go into operation.
She attempts to report the truth, but the head of the plant, Lloyd Hooks
(Hugh Grant) orders her assassinated.

The
fourth tale is “The Ghastly Ordeal of
Timothy Cavendish.” Set in London in 2012, this tale finds a fly-by-night
book agent Cavendish (Broadbent) unexpectedly incarcerated at a diabolical
nursing home. With the other exploited
old folks in the home, Cavendish engineers an escape from custody, and sells
the movie rights to his story.

The
fifth story, “An Orison of Somni-451”
is set in New Seoul in 2144 AD, as old Seoul succumbs to the ravages of global
warming. There, a female “fabricant,” Somni-451 (Doona Bae) regularly endures
slavery and exploitation but nonetheless honors the First Catechism: “Honor They Consumer.” Soon, she experiences an awakening about the
fabricants’ plight, and the connections between human beings. She conveys these thoughts to the world at
large after being rescued by the people’s union. Through this orison or prayer on viral video,
Somni, in later generations is worshiped as a prophet.

In
Cloud
Atlas’s sixth and final story, set in the post-apocalyptic Hawaii of
2346 AD, a grizzled old storyteller, Zachry (Hanks) recounts by campfire the
tale of how his tribe ended up in a new home, starting a new life. His story involves a gang of fearsome
cannibals called the Kona (led by Hugh Grant in terrifying war-paint…) and his fateful
decision to help a “prescient,” Meronym (Berry) on a long and dangerous trek to
a mountain summit. There, she believes,
an answer regarding mankind’s future may exist.
But Zachry’s got a devil on his back, one insistent on causing Meronym’s
mission to fail…

“Fear, belief, love…phenomena that determined the course of
our lives. These forces begin long before we are born and continue after we
perish…”

The
movie version of Cloud Atlas adapts all six stories highlighted in the book, but
takes the unusual step of doing so -- as
the descriptions above indicate -- with the same eight or ten actors
appearing in all segments, namely Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugh
Grant, Susan Sarandon, Hugo Weaving, Doona Bae, Ben Whishaw, Jim D’Arcy, and
Jim Sturgess.

Now,
just to be crystal clear, these actors are not
playing the same character in each story; but rather entirely different
individuals, a fact made abundantly plain by the creative and jaw-dropping
make-up effects featured on-screen.

So
Halle Berry plays both a black woman of the year 2346 and a white, Jewish woman
of the year 1936.

Likewise,
Tom Hanks plays a murderous English thug for the story set in 2012, a movie
star in the year 2144 AD, and the post-apocalyptic story-teller, Zachry, in the
post-apocalyptic finale.

The
question regarding this particular approach is: why?

Why
vet these six very different stories in such a way that the same repertory actors
perform all the parts?

The
answer ultimately comes down to the film’s application of Buddhist philosophy,
or what the dialogue terms “Eternal
Recurrence.”

Buddhists
will immediately recognize this concept as something akin to the Samsara, which
Wikipedia describes thusly: “

“…Samsara is
defined as the continual repetitive
cycle of birth and death that arises from ordinary beings' grasping and
fixating on a self and experiences. Specifically, samsara refers to the process
of cycling through one rebirth after another within the six realms of
existence,where each realm can
be understood as a physical realm or a psychological state characterized by a
particular type of suffering. Samsara arises out ofavidya(ignorance) and is characterized bydukkha(suffering, anxiety, dis-satisfaction). In the Buddhist view,
liberation from samsara is possible by following the Buddhist path.”

You may notice something important encoded in that
definition above. The Samsara is said to
have six realms of existence, and Cloud
Atlas likewise consists of six story-lines set in six time periods.

Thus the movie’s epic tapestry serves as a deliberate re-creation of the Samsara,
and the actors each portray multiple individuals or characters. But the argument could be made, I suppose
that they are playing…only one soul moving
through the six realms, from past to future (and in one fascinating case of
prescience, future to past…).

This fact means that the Tom Hanks character in
the first, third and sixth story are different people/individuals but are
perhaps the same soul, experiencing avidya and dukkha in a different state of existence,
or level of the Samsara.

Another way to describe Cloud Atlas’s thematic
conceit: each main character in the film is re-born into one of the six realms
and based on his “kindnesses” or “crimes” writes his soul’s very future going
forward.

Again, what’s the benefit of structuring the
story this way? Well, the directors are more
easily able to examine the ripple effects of moral or immoral decision-making
over a long period of time or history, for one thing.

For instance, the soul portrayed by Jim Broadbent
in the tale set in 1936 Scotland does something terrible to another person and
his soul eventually suffers for it. Specifically,
Vyvian Ayrs, a famous composer, imprisons Frobisher -- a young man of great talent -- in an attempt to steal his
work.

But then, in the 2012 story, “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish,”
the same soul (for which actor Broadbent is the visual avatar) receives his
karmic comeuppance: Cavendish is imprisoned in a nursing home of the
damned.

His soul’s evil acts in 1936 were paid forward to
the next realm of the Samsara and thus the next iteration of his soul, Timothy,
suffers grievously. And the manner of
the punishment is equal to the crime.
The soul goes from victimizer to victim, from jailer to jailed.

In one life: a jailer and exploiter.

In the next life: jailed and exploited.

Similarly, the soul symbolized by Hugh Grant undergoes
his karmic comeuppance across two stories and two epochs.As Lloyd Hooks, a nuclear plant manager in
1973, this soul willfully plans to murder thousands of people in a meltdown…all
because he is being paid by the oil industry to sow mistrust of nuclear
power.

By the time this corrupt soul reaches 2346
Hawaii, however, he is a half savage beast and a cannibal, the Kona Chief. His actions in life have made his journey
through the Samsara all the more horrible.
By his sixth go-round he has not evolved or transcended, but actually
devolved into something barely human, something very nearly animal.

In one life a killer by proxy.

In the next, a killer by hand...and teeth.

To fully understand and appreciate Cloud
Atlas it is necessary to understand the Buddhist underpinnings, the
concept of Samsara (or “eternal
recurrence” in the film’s lingo), and even karma. The viewer must realize he or she is
witnessing the march of souls from 1849 to 2346 and that each stop or each
story along the way is an opportunity for those souls to deliver kindnesses to
others and evolve to the next step, or deliver a crime, and continue in a realm
of suffering going forward.

As you are no doubt tired of reading here on the
blog, my highest aesthetic or critical criterion is that form must echo content in film, and that visuals must reflect the
story.

Cloud Atlas is so brilliant and
worthwhile a science fiction initiative, I submit, because it asks us -- through its casting and re-casting of the
same actors as souls in various incarnations -- to understand one possible
aspect or force of universal, constant human existence.

Perhaps the there is no sphere of the afterlife
at all. Perhaps our souls ride the wheel
of the Samsara, hopefully achieving wisdom as that wheel turns.And what we do here, now, affects where our
soul lands when we return to this plane of existence.

Had different actors played all the important
parts in Cloud Atlas, viewers would have no visual signifiers by which to
recognize the same soul in different stories and different eras, and therefore
we’d be unable to track their moral progress on the Samsara, in the “eternal recurrence” of human life.

The film thus suggests, by casting the same actor
as different individuals over a long span of time, that our lives stretch
beyond this moment of now. They go on. The flesh is mortal, but the soul is not. We keep repeating the same mistakes,
surrounded by the same souls, until we learn to change our behaviors, or until
we reach the outcome we desire and need.

None of this philosophy would be evident,
however, without Cloud Atlas’s complex structure. The film reflexively notes its own complexity
in an early voice-over narration by Cavendish (Broadbent): “While my extensive experience as an editor
has led me to disdain for flashbacks and flash forwards and all such tricksy
gimmicks, I believe that if you, dear reader, can extend your patience for just
a moment, you will find that there is a method to this tale of madness.”

That line of dialogue -- that explicit request for patience and understanding -- is at the
heart of Cloud Atlas’s ambitious strategy to chart the full human
experience. Since “we’re all connected,” the film requires the audience to engage with
its creative strategy. This task of
engagement and attention is richly rewarded however. Audiences that meet the film half-way will
feel part of a process of discovery…and then experience joy and awe as that
discovery unfolds, and layer after layer of meaning blossoms.

“I knew someone who had a birthmark similar to
that…”

Much of the challenge and joy that arises from an
engaged viewing of Cloud Atlas involves noting and cataloging the little touches
or grace notes that connect souls from one story (or level of the Samsara) to
the next.

For instance, a comet-shaped birth mark appears
on one character in each of the six tales, and then the film ends with a
shooting star -- a comet of sorts --
as its valedictory composition. Is this
comet-shaped birth mark ticking off the levels of the Samsara, ending with a
valediction in the cosmos, in Eternity itself?
Is it a signifier of the same soul, moving through various levels of the
Samsara? Again, the film opens itself to
various stimulating and challenging interpretations.

Similarly, a jeweled button that appears in “The Pacific Journal of Patrick Ewing”
re-appears again and again throughout history (or the future), owned by
different individuals.

And all six levels of
the Samsara are connected by a work of art featured prominently in the previous level of existence.

Frobisher in Story #2 reads Ewing’s diary from
Story #1

Luisa Rey in Story #3 listens to Frobisher’s
musical composition, Cloud Atlas, from Story #2, and so on.

Not only does music play a crucial role in the
film, but a movie version of Cavendish’s tale appears in the fifth story, and a
viral video from the fifth story plays a role in the sixth and final vignette.

In toto, therefore, Cloud Atlas seems to note
that art -- whether literature, music,
film, or even a webvideo -- is the
thing ties humans together on the Samsara from one life or level to the
next.

In other words,
our art is as immortal as we are, and it carries our stories and histories
into the unbound future.

We can learn from that art if we heed it, and we
ignore it at our own peril. This notion of art outliving individuals and
proving of great value to future generations is transmitted beautifully in a
line of dialogue: “My life extends far
beyond the limits of me.”

That extension of life may be in the soul itself,
or it may be in the thoughts transcribed in a book, or the musical notes of a
composition. It may be in a movie that speaks to the future, though it was made
in the past.

What is an ocean but a multitude of drops?

The interconnections between the six stories in the
film stretch even further. In all six tales featured in Cloud Atlas, a crime is
committed based on craven selfishness and thirst for power. This selfishness or power-thirst is tellingly
described in at least three different stories as being part and parcel of “The Natural Order.”

Consider:

The Natural Order permits for the slave-trader,
Haskell, to do his exploitative work.

The Natural Order permits for the murder of
whistle-blowers and the furtherance of avaricious corporate goals in 1973 San
Francisco.

The Natural Order allows the State to abuse and
cannibalize its Fabricants in New Seoul, and so forth (a fact foretold,
uniquely, by a joke about Soylent Green [1973] in the previous
story, set in 2012).

Virtually every conflict in every story featured
in Cloud
Atlas lands a pair of soul-mates up against proponents of some Natural
Order. And the Natural Order always
seems to possess the superior hand.

As Haskell, the slave trader notes in the first
story: “There
is a natural order to this world, and those who try to upend it do not fare
well. This movement will never survive; if you join them, you and your entire
family will be shunned. At best, you will exist a pariah to be spat at and
beaten-at worst, to be lynched or crucified. And for what? For what? No matter
what you do it will never amount to anything more than a single drop in a
limitless ocean.”

This plot-line represents the film’s embedded social critique of “Natural
Order” and the so-called “Natural Order’s” vehicle on this mortal coil: anarcho-capitalism for lack of a better
term.

The importance of status -- or “reputation” -- in
a capitalist class-system is what drives blackmail and exploitation in “Letters from Frobisher.”

The desire to control energy resources (at the
height of the Energy Crisis in 1973, no less) is what drives Lloyd Hooks to
contemplate the murder of thousands of innocent people in “Half-Lives…”

Timothy Cavenish ends up at the nursing home
while running away from a $60,000 dollar debt in “Ordeal.”

The economic system of New Seoul mass produces
people to be slaves to hedonist “consumers,”
and then cannibalizes those man-made people when they can no longer work, in “An Orison of Sonmi-451.”

And finally, the battle to control food and other
resources dominates the final story, with the Kona Clan operating as the
ultimate corporate raiders/cannibals.

More than once in the film, we hear the mantra of
Natural Order spoken aloud, and with hungry salaciousness: “The weak are meat, and the strong must eat.’

The point to all this is simply that when the
goal of humanity is to control power or own supreme wealth rather than better
oneself (and find true love…), crimes are born instead of kindnesses…and
karma’s a bitch.

In at least three of the stories (“Letters from
Frobisher,” “Half-Lives” and “Orison…”) the meeting of souls together in true
love is brutally curtailed by the forces of the so-called “Natural Order.” In other stories, however (Ewing’s, Cavendish’s
and Zachry’s), true love is victorious over the Natural Order because
kindnesses, not crimes, carry the day.

Soul-mates threatened by the "natural order."

The same soul-mates, in another place and time.

The answer to the question posed by one character
in the film – “why do we keep making the
same mistakes?” – is simply that Natural Order, aligned with the levers of power,
often seizes the day over the better angels of man’s nature. But it’s a constant battle, and for that
reason, our souls “cross and re-cross our
own/old paths,” trying to achieve justice…and happiness.

“This world spins from the same unseen forces that twist
our hearts…”

In the second story, Frobisher composes “The
Cloud Atlas,” a sextet, and from this work the film derives its title and its
structure.

But today, I gaze at a science fiction film of
such scope, ambition, and convention-shattering that I can’t help but think of
“cloud” computing too. With cloud
computing, a program can run on multiple computers at the same time, networked
together.

That technological term therefore seems like a
good analogy for our “interconnected” souls.
We’re all here on this planet together, right now, and according to Cloud
Atlas “the gulf between us”
is but an “illusion.” In how we treat each other, we create a map
-- or atlas -- a network of bonds, of
loves and hates, stretching outward and into the future, and reverberating
through the very corridors of existence.

In the end, like Frobisher suggests, perhaps we
all become, art or music.

And if that is the case, wouldn’t you rather your
eternal song be one of harmony, not dissonance?

About John

award-winning author of 27 books including Horror Films FAQ (2013), Horror Films of the 1990s (2011), Horror Films of the 1980s (2007), TV Year (2007), The Rock and Roll Film Encyclopedia (2007), Mercy in Her Eyes: The Films of Mira Nair (2006),, Best in Show: The Films of Christopher Guest and Company (2004), The Unseen Force: The Films of Sam Raimi (2004), An Askew View: The Films of Kevin Smith (2002), The Encyclopedia of Superheroes on Film & Television (2004), Exploring Space:1999 (1997), An Analytical Guide to TV's Battlestar Galactica (1998), Terror Television (2001), Space:1999 - The Forsaken (2003) and Horror Films of the 1970s (2002).

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"...some of the best writing about the genre has been done by John Kenneth Muir. I am particularly grateful to him for the time and attention he's paid to things others have overlooked, under-appreciated and often written off. His is a fan's perspective first, but with a critic's eye to theme and underscore, to influence and pastiche..." - Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files, in the foreword to Horror Films FAQ (October 2013).

"Hands down, John Kenneth Muir is one of the finest critics and writers working today. His deep analysis of contemporary American culture is always illuminating and insightful. John's film writing and criticism is outstanding and a great place to start for any budding writer, but one should also examine his work on comic books, TV, and music. His weighty catalog of books and essays combined with his significant blog production places him at the top of pop culture writers. Johns work is essential in understanding the centrality of culture in modern society." - Professor Bob Batchelor, cultural historian and Executive Director of the James Pedas Communication Center at Thiel College (2014).

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